GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 23: Emergency Brain Surgery

Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Takeoff

Jar broke into the electronic locks and hotwired the AV while Paxos and The Peacock dragged Specter and Emma aboard, followed by Mary Jane on the stretcher.  Paxos tried to Jam all the trackers in everyone/everything, but failed due to the euphoria from the uppers she was on, which meant Jar was going to have to do some open-brain surgery (with only a first aid kit) to disable/remove everything before they switched to the getaway AV under the overpass in Japantown.  He started on Mary Jane as The Peacock throttled up the thrusters and they lifted off.

A single large drone shot out of a magnetic launcher and opened up with a hail of fire from its gun, but The Peacock was able to put sufficient distance between them for it to be ineffective.  As they flew away, something in Mary Jane's skull started beeping, and Jar shouted for The Peacock to turn around: she had a cranial bomb installed and it looked like it was rigged to blow if she got too far away from Militech Tower.  They took the AV back into a circling pattern around the tower to stall for time, but Jar would need 8 minutes, which was an eternity when fleeing from armed drones.

More drones were launching every minute from the launchers, and soon enough an entire swarm was after them, but The Peacock outmaneuvered them with ease with the luxury AV's superior handling and speed.  It was all going too smoothly, so nobody was surprised when an NCPD attack helicopter swooped up from the skyscrapers and commanded them over the radio to land or be fired upon.  Rather than landing, The Peacock went off in a tighter spiraling pattern around and down the tower.  Trying to keep up, a pair of the severely-outclassed drones rammed into one of the AV landing pads on the side of the tower, sending it plunging down to the streets below.

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 22: Family Reunion

Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Kidnapping

With the guard bleeding out of his empty eye socket on the floor, the crew headed down the hall to regroup with Specter.  There were four cells with floor-to-ceiling glass (assumed bulletproof) facing the hallway, one of which was blocked off by curtains.  The cell adjacent held a bunch of medical equipment and was connected to the curtained room by a door inside.  Paxos ran a Ping on the curtained room and detected the kind of devices you'd see if someone was living there (TV, kettle, microwave, etc).  There was also a person with the typical cyberware, including a biomonitor.  The dying man on the floor also had a biomonitor.

Paxos spun up a Jam to hopefully convince whoever was monitoring the biomonitor that it was a false alarm or something while frantically getting into her netrunner suit as quickly as possible.  While she was undressing, she also let the others know that there were gun turrets concealed in the ceiling of the hall, though if they came online odds were the crew were dead anyway.  The Peacock searched the guard's body and grabbed his ID badge, which they swiped through the card reader on the cell with the medical equipment.  It blinked green and the glass door slid open.

Specter and The Peacock drew their weapons and continued onto the side door and went into the curtained room, which looked to have been converted into something resembling a slightly large studio apartment.  Standing in the corner was Mary Jane, The Peacock's sister, though she looked gaunt and sickly, with an IV running to her arm.  The Peacock told her who they were, but given they'd had extensive reconstructive surgery a month or so ago, she didn't believe them.  They tried to think of some touching family memory only the two of them would know, but came up totally blank.

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 21: Execution

Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Get in the Trunk

Specter picked up some kevlar suits for himself and The Peacock to better look like bodyguards, while Paxos went over the footage of Hua Luo: turned out she wore glasses, which meant Paxos could bring her own pair of smart glasses.  Jar threw together a collapsible stretcher for carrying Mary-Jane out of Millitech tower, and The Peacock stashed an AV from their nomad family under the highway in Japantown and covered it with a tarp.  When the day came, they split up and went to North Oaks to kidnap and impersonate the execs; Specter and Jar went to Fenris Moneaux's mansion, and Paxos and The Peacock went to Luo's.

Jar disabled the security fence, and cut a hole for himself and Specter with his toolhand, then the pair snuck across the lawns to the front door, where Moneaux's bodyguard was waiting for the exec.  Once he emerged from the mansion, Specter snuck up behind the two of them, triggered his sandy, and knocked Moneaux out with a blow to the back of the head; the goon, though, reacted quickly enough to block it.  This led to a brief scuffle where Specter overpowered him and knocked him out as well, but it left Specter with a few new bruises.  Jar swapped into Fenris' clothes (some ridiculous haute couture), and the pair stuffed the bodies in the bodyguard's car's trunk and drove off to the AV pickup at the edge of Charter Hills.

Meanwhile, Paxos and The Peacock were climbing over the wall of Hua Luo's mansion.  Paxos hacked into the cameras and looped them, letting them make it to the front door, which she also hacked to shut down its camera.  She hit the buzzer and said she was here to pick up Ms. Luo, who replied over the intercom that the camera seemed to be on the fritz, and that she'd be down shortly.  Before Luo made it down, though, the actual security guard showed up, forcing them to scuttle into a hedge to hide.  They didn't fully escape his notice, though, and the guard relayed over his radio that he was going to take a closer look.

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 20: Setup

Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Coming Up With A Plan

With help from Jar on the back-end, The Peacock impersonated a Night Corp employee and called into Militech's logistics division, asking for plans for the tower because they were getting a new set of automated garbage trucks and needed precise measurements.  Plans in hand, Paxos and Specter analyzed them, looking for weak points and places suited for long-term habitation where they might be storing Mary-Jane, The Peacock's sister.  Two places stuck out: animal pens (used for live ammunition tests, naturally), and some of the security holding cells about halfway up the tower.

Typically, the cells were for relatively short-term while they worked out extradition treaties with whichever company's agents had been captured (mercenaries like the crew would simply be killed).  In terms of alternate entry points, there were multiple AV landing pads at different heights, rather than a single hangar, and the "gorilla chute" which let out waste from the animal pens on the fifth floor.  They also learned some fun facts: at 71 stories aboveground, it is 1 higher than Arasaka Tower.  After its construction was completed, a city ordinance was passed banning construction over 69 stories.

Figuring flying in on AV sounded better than the gorilla chute, they started looking into them.  Jar looked into the specific models that were in use so they'd blend in, while The Peacock reached out to, Kei Honda, a certified pilot they knew who flew under Airs United, one of many fly-by-night (literally!) companies that existed to ferry executives who felt being driving to work was below them.  Kei wasn't working with Militech at the moment, but to give them a start she knew a company that did: 1776 Holdings.  Specter went dumpster diving outside their offices to see if they'd thrown out anything interesting, but got distracted instead and didn't find anything.

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 19: Jumping Out Of Windows

 Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "The Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Back In The Safehouse

Two hundred large was more than enough for the crew, so they took Fernandez' offer ("Specter, what do you think?" "Give me the money") and then went off to each do their own thing with their ill-gotten gains.  It was the holidays, so naturally nobody did anything fun; The Peacock got therapy, and Paxos ignored her boyfriend to arrange bribes to officials in Peru.  Specter arranged to move into a penthouse suite starting on the 1st, but he spent the rest of 2078 skulking in the ventilation ducts of Tyger Claw hangouts to gain intel for the Wingless Dragons.  

In the new year, the crew picked up word that, despite their best efforts, Arasaka had gotten an idea of who had robbed them and was hunting them down.  Figuring it was because The Peacock had suspiciously never shown up again after the heist, they got extreme cosmetic surgery (a 6" height increase + alterations to their bone structure and skin to look Japanese, and started styling their hair in the undercut style of fem-V from the game), then they all went to ground in a safehouse Downtown.

After two weeks, The Peacock (aka Peacock, The) got sick of "wasting" time and left the safehouse to go look for more intel on Mary Jane, their missing sister.  They tracked down Bonya Slade, who was working under Rin Shimamura at Konpeki Plaza, and eavesdropped in on a girls' night out.  Over a long night and many drinks, they eventually confirmed that the person whose DNA had been used for the clones (who The Peacock knew to be Mary Jane), was on the books as a Militech employee. 

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 18: The Arasaka Tower Heist

 Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Infiltration

Jar picked up a suit of Arasaka body armour on the black market for Paxos to wear during their infiltration; she then went and picked up the revolver and rifle the guards used.  The next morning, Peacock finally heard back from Arasaka and went in for their first day under their assumed name "Hermione Granger".  They would be working as the bodyguard for Katsuri Sugimoto, a junior division head in intelligence, whose last bodyguard had died in the line of duty.  Orientation wasn't exciting; they got their ID card and corporate licenses for their firearms, which had to be signed in at the end of every shift.

A typical day would involve arriving at Arasaka Tower at 4AM, suiting up in the barracks on the 30th floor, then heading back downstairs where they would then pile into a convoy of armoured trucks that went to pick up the mid-levels from their heavily guarded apartment compound.  They would then serve as Sugimoto's shadow for the rest of the day until he returned home, typically around 8PM.  The onboarding took even longer, so by the time Peacock had arranged for a getaway vehicle with the Birds of Prey, their nomad family, they were completely exhausted and had no time to properly rest.

On the day of the heist, Peacock drove in, their fancy tech pistol concealed in a newly-implanted hidden holster and a scrambler smuggled inside a secret pocket, and parked the getaway car in the employee parking lot.  They then suited up and boarded the armoured convoy to pick up Sugimoto.  From there, they proceeded to shadow their charge to his office without incident (other than a spilt coffee).  Later in the morning, Paxos hacked the cameras and she, Jar, and Specter snuck in through a loading bay, their fake IDs granting them access through most locked doors, and Paxos was able to use her stolen uniform to scout ahead.

GURPS Cyberpunk 2078 Session 17: Job Interview

Characters:

Alexander "Specter" Marshal - Solo
Pat "Peacock" Watson - "Former" Nomad
Ruby "Paxos" Lang - Netrunner

Braxton "Jar" Jiggs - Cybertech/Ripperdoc     NPC

Plans Within Plans

Peacock reached out to an old buddy, Walker O'heron, who owed them a favour and learned that the passkeys held by Kazumi Kanata and Yorinobu were probably the zetatech K-series, but when Paxos dove into the 'Saka net to confirm this, she got zapped by a black ICE databomb that had been left in the financial documents.  Flames shot out of her neural port and cybereyes, but she was able to jack out and then put out the fires before they got any worse.  Still, it put her in the hospital for a few days while she got skin grafts.  While she was recovering, she went through the photos Jennifer Thracker had taken from inside Arasaka Tower and compiled what useful information she could.

Peacock, meanwhile, went to Corpo Plaza with the intent of observing the tower security and maybe lip-reading employees on smoke breaks but unexpectedly struck gold: some HR employee was going on a rant to a coworker in Reconciliation Park (while never once turning away from where Peacock was watching!) about how a whole bunch of security staff had jumped ship to one of the other factions over this conflict with Kang Tao.  Apparently, Arasaka was hiring, and for once they were looking explicitly for non-japanese applicants with no scruples to become bodyguards for mid-level execs.

The next day, Peacock came back when work let out with a badge scanner hidden in a laptop bag to get some credentials for the techies to work with.  They had to get almost right up against people to scan them, but that wasn't a problem with the crowd.  While that was happening, Paxos was scouring Arasaka press releases, hoping she'd find something that would require the execs to access the data vault on their own.  Unfortunately, the closest thing she found was Yojimbo Kageki 3, a video game that wasn't due for digital release for several weeks.  Even if it was in the vault, it was past their deadline anyway.